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Friday, December 09, 2005
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WAKEY WAKEY: National Review's Mark Levin wakes up, stretches, rubs his eyes and asks: And where is all the evidence that U.S. armed forces and intelligence serves are engaged in torture? Is it widespread? Where is this occurring? McCain hasn't made the case. We get mostly the same kind of platitudes he was famous for during the campaign-finance reform debate, e.g., the system is "corrupt," money equals corruption, and so forth. Shouldn't we stop beating up ourselves over this until such evidence is presented? We seem to be making law here based on hypothetical arguments, or worse -- left-wing and enemy propaganda. I refer Levin to the Schmidt Report, the Taguba Report, the Jones-Fay Report, the Schlesinger Report, the mounds of evidence collected by the International Red Cross, the hundreds of carefully checked newspaper reports documenting torture, abuse, murder, rape, and beatings in every single theater of this war by every branch of the armed services against defenseless military detainees. I refer him to the testimony of West Point graduate Ian Fishback and countless others. I refer him to the many memos constructed by the Bush administration defining and redefining "torture" to the point of meaninglessness. May I offer him a cup of coffee and a warm welcome to reality as well?
(By the way, the Lowry notion that the McCain Amendment offers no guidelines as to what is permitted is untrue. The McCain Amendment specifically endorses the Army Field Manual, which specifies 17 specific interrogation techniques, and has been the gold standard for decades, until the Bush administration endorsed torture. One question for Lowry: does he define "waterboarding" as torture? It's funny but I have yet to get a single Bush apologist on record saying so. I'd think waterboarding is indisputably torture. Condi Rice won't say if it is. Rumsfeld won't say if it is. Bush won't say if it is. Ever wonder why? Memo to Lowry: because we've done it.)
(Via Daily Dish.)
9:35:23 PM 
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Locus reports that Robert Sheckley, one of the best humorists science fiction ever produced, died at 77. Here is the SFWA obit.
1:30:08 PM
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Great news: Gregory Benford is blogging. The first post picks up on some of what David Brin has written about fantasy and modernism:
I think this move to fantasy has led to a core lessening of what I value in the larger genre, with a lot less real thinking going on about the future. Instead, people choose to be horrified by it, or to run away from it into medieval fantasy. The American culture that once read Heinlein and went the moon now puts George Martin (a very good writer, who started in sf) on the bestseller lists, and goes nowhere.
I see all of this as a retreat from the present, or rather, from the implications of the future. I don%u2019t think it%u2019s an accident that fantasy novels dominate a market that once was plainly that of Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, and Phil Dick. I think it%u2019s to the detriment of the total society, because science fiction, for decades really, has been the canary in the mineshaft for the advanced nations, to tell us what to worry about up ahead. Phil Dick was a genius at this. He could see the implications of the technologies, and what they would lead to, and people%u2019s responses to them.
...But who can create a better society when you spend your free time thinking about really big problems like dragons? Of course, part of this is that these are people who never worked on a farm. They have no idea what life was like even a few centuries ago—almost entirely grunt labor. So they think lords and kings are swell, romantic. Growing up in southern Alabama, I cut cane and sacked potatoes and worked on fishing boats—and quickly realized that the best jobs were indoors. I determined that I wasn’t going to do an ordinary manual-laborer job, because I found it boring, plus other detriments. My grandfather died in his forties of lockjaw, for example.
Pretty good stuff: but as Darrell Schweitzer says in the comments, it would e a shame if the blog and other fiction meant no more Benford novels.
(Via Locus Magazine.)
8:59:51 AM
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The stupidest thing I've read this week:
But perhaps even more strongly, Lennon detested hypocrisy and always remained on the search for the "next big thing." Given this, I doubt he would have stagnated politically like so many of his leftwing brethren; rather, I believe he would have reversed course entirely a la Michael Medved, David Horowitz, and other liberals-turned-conservatives.
Medved and Horowitz were morons when they were "leftists" and they're morons today. To use Lennon's name in the same context of these two dipshits is ludicrous.
8:53:42 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Steve Michel.
Last update: 1/1/2006; 11:08:48 AM.
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